The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

By A. J. Mackinnon

Truly hilarious books are rare. Even rarer are those based on real events. Join A.J. Mackinnon, your charming and eccentric guide, on an amazing voyage in a boat called Jack de Crow.
Equipped with his cheerful optimism and a pith helmet, this Australian Odysseus in a dinghy travels from the borders of North Wales to the Black Sea – 4900 kilometres over salt and fresh water, under sail, at the oars, or at the end of a tow-rope – through twelve countries, 282 locks and numerous trials and adventures, including an encounter with Balkan pirates. Along the way he experiences the kindness of strangers, gets very lost, and perfects the art of slow travel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781743822517

A. J. Mackinnon

A.J. Mackinnon was born in 1963 and travelled as a boy on P&O liners between Australia and England, developing a love of slow travel. He started his teaching career in 1984 and has worked in various schools around the world, sharing his passion for English Literature, Mathematics, Drama, Art and Philosophy with countless students over the years. He now lives in the Victorian High Country of Australia where he continues to love his teaching, his garden and various other creative projects.

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Praise for The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

‘A great travel writer and more importantly a great traveller’ —The Sydney Morning Herald

‘Not just an adventurer, but an artist, philosopher and keen observer of the world around him’ —The Canberra Times

‘Mackinnon’s journey makes a lovely picaresque tale, one dotted with English literary references and wonderful descriptions of the English and European countryside’ —Good Reading

‘A marvellous adventure, and Mackinnon recounts it with humour and unflagging enthusiasm … a clever and entirely engaging read’ —The Melbourne Times

‘A wonderful idea for a book – a series of ever bolder improvisations … undertaken in praise of the spirit of adventure’ —Times Literary Supplement

‘A must-read for anyone planning to sail backwards through Europe. Epic, exciting and extremely funny.’ —Tom Gleisner

titlepage

Published by Black Inc.,

an imprint of Schwartz Books Pty Ltd

22–24 Northumberland Street

Collingwood VIC 3066, Australia

[e-mail]

www.blackincbooks.com

Copyright © A.J. Mackinnon 2009, 2022

First published in 2009; this edition published in 2022

A.J. Mackinnon asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

This is a revised edition of The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow by

A.J. Mackinnon, first published by Seafarer Books, 102 Redwald Road,

Rendlesham, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 2TE, UK.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

9781760643171 (hardback)

9781743822517 (ebook)

Illustrations and maps by A.J. Mackinnon

Book design by Thomas Deverall

Author photo by Stephanie White

Contents

PART ONE    Bumping into Places

The Teacher’s Thief

The Dinghy and the Dreamer

Departure and Dismay

Sails and Stained-Glass

Rapids and Repairs

Steam Trains and Smooth Sailing

High Tide to Bristol

Wi’ a Hundred Locks an’ A’ an’ A’

Death and the Dreaming Spires

Return to Reading

Capsize and Colleges

London and the Law

PART TWO    My Purpose Holds

Dooms and Delays

Tide on the Thames

Of Shallows and Shipwreck

Cake and Carpentry

Dashing to Dover

Crossing to Calais

Dead Dogs and Englishmen

Et in Arcadia Ego

A Jollyboat in Germany

PART THREE    Into the East

Contrary Currents and Kindness

The Kaiser’s Canal

Pigeons and Palaces

Wilderland and War

Proud Hearts and Empty Pockets

Bad Times in Bulgaria

The Wings of the Morning

PICTURE SECTION

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Notes

Part One

Bumping into Places

The Teacher’s Thief

For there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you.

—ROBERT GREENE, A Groat’s Worth of Wit

This is an account of a journey made from North Shropshire in England to Sulina on the Black Sea, sailing and rowing over three thousand miles in a small Mirror dinghy. It was in many ways an accident that it happened at all. I had intended to spend a quiet two weeks travelling the sixty miles or so down to Gloucester on the River Severn. Somehow things got out of hand – a year later I had reached Romania and was still going.

I have many heroes. They are mostly drawn from the world of children’s literature, I confess. But the earliest hero I can remember is Doctor Dolittle, that plump and kindly figure who lived in Pud-dleby-on-the-Marsh and talked to the animals. It was not this last attribute that first entranced me, however. It was the illuminated capital letters at each chapter heading which made a high-pooped, billow-sailed little galleon of each capital ‘S,’ or turned an ‘A’ into a frame of leaning palm trees, and, above all, it was the marvellously casual line:

Doctor Dolittle sailed away in a ship with his monkey and his parrot, his pig and his duck, and bumped into Africa.

Bumped into Africa! Here was the way to travel! No timetables, no travel agents, no dreary termini clanging with loudspeaker announcements. No grubby platforms, no passports, no promises of postcards to be sent on safe arrival, just the little ship slipping down the river to the sea. Indeed the chief attributes of all the good Doctor’s voyages seemed to be simple enough: a cheerful optimism and a beloved hat, both of which I happened to have. There was clearly nothing stopping me doing the same.

I had been working for six years as a teacher in a place called Ellesmere College. This is a minor public school set amid the meres and meadows of Shropshire – a flat Shire land of grazing cattle and placid canals where narrowboats glide serenely across the countryside. In the distance rise the first blue hills of Wales, an altogether wilder and more enchanted land.

Some of that dark Welsh magic must have leaked from those nearby valleys, seeping across the prosperous plain to lap about the confines of Ellesmere College. For in my first year there something happened which has a bearing on all this present tale.

Amid the busy routine of a new term in a new place, there grew in my mind a faint but persistent daydream, a niggling ambition of the most childish and unlikely sort: namely, to own a tame crow. To this day I am not quite sure where such a fancy came from. Perhaps it was the weight of my academic gown on my shoulders, heavy as Prospero’s cloak, that prompted me to seek out an Ariel of my own.

One does not, of course, share such daydreams readily with others. They have a habit of wilting on contact with outside scrutiny. But when my oldest friend rang to see how I was settling in to my new life at Ellesmere, I did confide to him, half jokingly, self-mockingly, my avian fancy. Well, Rupert has long ago become accustomed to this sort of thing from me, so after expressing a polite but distant acknowledgement of my latest daydream, he neatly turned the conversation to more immediate issues such as the quality of school food, coming holiday dates and whether I’d purchased a car yet.

But perhaps such fancies are not so much wishes as faint psychic previsions of what will be. For the next day, the very next day, I received a brief note in my pigeon-hole via the College receptionist: ‘Crow arrives Friday next. Prepare.’

Rupert had, within hours of putting down the phone, stumbled across a tame, slightly injured jackdaw that needed an owner.

The bird arrived in a cat basket in the middle of the House Singing Competition and, from the moment he arrived, divided the entire College into two camps – those who adored him, and those who loathed him to the least of his sooty black feathers. The first camp consisted of the Headmaster’s family, the laundry ladies and me; the second camp was everyone else, who regarded him more as a Caliban than an Ariel.

I called him Jack de Crow as a pun on the Headmaster’s surname, du Croz – though his full name was actually Jack Micawber

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The Master Summons His Familiar

Phalacrocorax Magister Mordicorvus de Crow, a wild and marvellous name spun out of some dark, dog-Latin, cobwebby corner of my brain and which defies rational explanation. The Headmaster was, I think, suitably flattered. He did not, after all, dismiss me when his school was systematically plundered by the new arrival.

For Jack de Crow found a wide field of play for his talents at Ellesmere. In the first week he burgled the Bursar’s bedroom and stole Mrs Bursar’s ruby earring, demolished an important set of exam papers in the office of the Director of Studies, and brought to a halt an important hockey match by sitting on the hockey ball and unpicking all the stitches before he could be shooed away. Week Two ended with the loss of a gold pen and a bunch of keys from my Housemaster’s desk, and the steady increase among the students of ‘Crow-ate-my-homework’–style excuses. And this was when he was still in less than peak condition.

Once he had recovered, Jack strutted and swooped and thieved his way unchecked around College, taking refuge at times of crisis in the hallowed precincts of the Headmaster’s orchard garden under the protection of his kindly namesake. If I stepped outside and raised my arm and called ‘Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack!’ he would come fluttering down from some lofty chimney-pot to perch on my wrist, much to the consternation of the elderly Chaplain, who was convinced that – as if being Australian wasn’t bad enough – I was in league with the Devil. Thus did Jack live out my enchanter’s dream.

But then, one day, he was gone. Many of my colleagues breathed a sigh of relief and stopped looking nervously over their shoulders, and even I felt that life might be easier; I had been held largely to blame for Jack’s list of crimes. But something ever so slightly magical had faded from the landscape. Time and routine and normality rose to obliterate that first dream-like year in a tangle of timetables and curricula, meetings and lesson plans, sporting fixtures, rehearsals and the slow grinding of the academic year, and the name of Jack Micawber Phalacrocorax Magister Mordicorvus de Crow faded from the memories of men.

Until years later when I decided it was time to move on and Jack de Crow was gloriously revived.

Five years had fled by. My feet were itchy and I felt it was time for a grand gesture and a dramatic farewell, and to have lots of people say touching things about me. Finally I hit upon it. The very thing! I decided to leave Ellesmere – not by the Inter-City 10.15 to Birmingham with a suitcase in each hand, not by a lift to the airport checking the whereabouts of my passport every three minutes, not even by hitch-hiking off between the dusty July hedgerows with a cardboard sign outstretched – but, like my dear Doctor Dolittle, by sailing away in a jolly little galleon and seeing what I bumped into on the way.

The Dinghy and the Dreamer

There was a merry passenger, A messenger, a mariner, Who built a gilded gondola To wander in …

—J.R.R. TOLKIEN, Errantry

Just over the fields from Ellesmere College lies a little mere, fringed with tall trees, dotted with ducks and coots and the odd haughty swan, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays, suddenly alive with the skim and swoop of white sails. Here on this strip among the speedwell lie thirty or forty little sailing boats – the fleet of the White-mere Sailing Club. Here are the gaudy pink and blue of plastic Toppers, constructed seemingly of Lego and Tupperware; the slim white forms of Lasers, half gull and half shark; the tiny wooden Optimists like little floating armchairs. But right at the back of this meadow strip in a corner of the fence, half smothered in thistles and golden ragwort, is the upturned hull of an ancient Mirror dinghy, lowliest and least of the College sailing fleet. Its deep curved wooden hull is a fading, peeling yellow. Its square pram nose is lost in a tangle of blackberry brambles, and out of the dark slit of the centreboard case a dozen spiders battle for supremacy with the scuttling woodlice.

It is a sorry sight, but for all that my heart kicks with nostalgia. A Mirror is to the sailing world what a Volkswagen Beetle is to the world of motoring. Everyone, anywhere, without exception, who has ever sailed a dinghy seems to have learnt the basic skills in one of these gallant little tubs with their distinctive scarlet sails, almost invariably taught by some eccentric great-aunt wearing a big straw hat and calling out ‘Swallows and Amazons forever!’ with each tack and turn.

People will tell you that the Mirror was first designed in the 1950s in response to a competition initiated by the Daily Mirror, but frankly I don’t believe it. No, it was clearly designed some time in the 1900s as a joint project between Arthur Ransome and Heath Robinson, with Ernest Shepard chipping in occasionally on the blueprints. Looking down at the familiar lines of this upturned dinghy lying in the hot May sunshine, I am suddenly struck by an odd notion.

‘Phil!’ I call out to the Master-in-Charge-of-Sailing. ‘Does this Mirror float?’

He straightens up from some screw-tightening task on a nearby boat trailer and wades through thistles to join me. We both gaze down at the patchy hull in the hot sunshine.

‘Hmm. Not sure. It did once, I assume.’

‘When?’

‘1946, I think. No, no, I tell a lie. It was before the War, I reckon.’

We turn it over, revealing a patch of sun-starved tendrils and blanched stems, a nest of five fieldmice and eight million woodlice, but, remarkably, a reasonably unscathed interior. I ponder. A good sand down. A tin of paint. A couple of coats of varnish. She might just do.

‘Er, Phil, could I borrow her, do you think? Just for a bit. I’m thinking I might take her on a trip when I leave College – sail away in her, even. What do you think?’

Phil gazed out across the blue-silver waters of Whitemere, surrounded on all sides by woods and hilly fields, and stroked his beard.

‘Well, yes, of course. Only …’ He sounded doubtful.

‘Yes?’

‘Well, setting off from here, I don’t think you’ll get very far. No one’s discovered a Northwest Passage out yet. Twice round the mere and I think you’ll be getting bored somehow.’

But it was decided. In six weeks’ time I would put the newly refurbished Mirror in the nearby Llangollen canal (a more promising through route than Whitemere) and see where I got to – Gloucester near the mouth of the Severn, I thought. Phil, that saintly man, even promised to drive down to wherever I reached and pick my vessel up in a trailer to return it to weedy retirement at Whitemere, leaving me to continue by balloon, elephant, in the belly of a whale or whatever else would avoid the tedium and predictability of International Air Travel.

Meanwhile, there was much work to be done: paint and varnish and sandpaper to be purchased, the Mirror’s rigging and sails to be dug out from ancient mothballs in the sailing loft, maps consulted, oars and rowlocks obtained, and a dozen other things, all on top of the end-of-term scramble.

Three weeks went by before I even gave the derelict dinghy another thought, by which time I found that Phil had quietly organised for the boat to be brought up to College, stripped, sanded, varnished and painted, and there she* was, looking as bright and sturdy as a toy duck in buttercup-yellow with her timbers honey-gold inside. The only thing left for me to do was to decide on a name. After three seconds’ thought, armed with a pot of gloss black, I painted in wobbly letters on her transom and both sides of the prow the proud appellation Jack de Crow.

Just as I had arrived at Ellesmere with a daydream solidifying around me in the form of that notorious bird, so too would I depart it with Jack accompanying me – in a new guise certainly, but still, I suspected, with the same quality of waywardness that had been the original Jack’s trademark.

Now is the right time, while I am standing over the dinghy in the warm sunshine waiting for the black paint to dry, to describe a Mirror dinghy for the benefit of those not fortunate enough to have had a nautical Swallows-and-Amazons great-aunt. I comfort myself with the thought that all the classics are unashamedly dull when it comes to describing the minutiae of nautical travel.

Jack de Crow is eleven feet long and four feet wide. Her nose is not pointed like most dinghies, but cut off square, giving her a sturdy, snub-nosed look. There is nothing even remotely aggressive or shark-like about a Mirror. She looks about as streamlined and racy as a toy hippo. The front three feet consist of a flat deck beneath which are two door-less lockers. This is where your aunt stows away bottles of ginger pop and pemmican sandwiches and more serious sailors store spare bits of rope or sail or shackles. It was where I was to stow all my worldly possessions: a space about the size of your average vegetable crisper.

Three broad decks or seats run right around the cockpit, making a Mirror the most sofa-like of all small dinghies to sail, and enabling several First Mates, an Able Seaman and a Ship’s Boy to be deployed in relative comfort about the dinghy. Across the middle, however, is a sturdy thwart where a solitary oarsman will sit to row. Slotting into the gunwale on either side to hold the oars are the rowlocks, pronounced ‘rollocks,’ much to the amusement of the Third Form when attending sailing lessons. (Yes, alright, settle down, Smithers, settle down …) So much for the dinghy as a mere rowing boat. However, she is primarily a sailing vessel and as such needs a mast, rigging, a centreboard and a rudder.

A Mirror’s mast is only ten feet tall, not nearly tall enough to take a full-sized sail, so it makes use of a gaff, a long light beam of wood with a hollow groove along its underside into which the thick leading edge of the sail is threaded. It is this gaff that is hauled aloft and when fully erect (Alright, Smithers, I’ve warned you once) projects out another six feet or so above the mast top, providing the necessary height for the sail.

By modern design standards this is a clumsy contraption, but it was ideal for my purposes. Unlike most dinghy sailors out for a quick skim on a local reservoir, I would be encountering bridges, and it is a very rare bridge that is generous enough to allow a fully masted dinghy to sail beneath it with impunity. With the ability, however, to simply lower the gaff and dip the peak and still keep sailing onwards, I was sure that I could escape being mauled by all but the lowest and meanest of the bridge tribe.

We have just hauled up the mainsail and noticed that along its bottom edge is a long, heavy and potentially deadly wooden beam, a boom. This is what swings about in a gale in a sea-faring film and sweeps hero and villain off into the raging seas to battle it out there once the poop-deck fighting has become tedious. At the outer end is a dangling pulley through which a rope, the mainsheet, threads. This then runs through a series of pulleys to end up in the skipper’s hand, allowing him to haul in or let out the mainsail with ease. The only thing you need to know about this is that of all the myriad pieces of tackle and equipment on a sailing boat, this is the one that will jam, tangle or catch at every opportunity and cause imminent death by drowning, strangulation or sheer bloody bad temper.

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Nearly finished. A smaller sail known as the jib runs up the forestay. It is apparently invaluable for sailing into the wind for some mysterious aerodynamic reason. Very soon after setting off , though, I abandoned the additional complexity of a jib, and the relevant Law of Aerodynamics went off in a sulk somewhere and Jack and I got on perfectly well without its pedantic presence. So much for science.

The rudder, I assume, hardly needs explaining unless, dear Reader, you have grown up as a member of some desert-dwelling tribe without even the scantiest knowledge of boats. Nevertheless I will explain that it is the most vulnerable piece of the dinghy’s equipment, being prone to ploughing into underwater obstacles, crushing against lock walls, jamming against banks and so on. By some divine mystery, however, by the end of the whole trip, it was the single part of the entire boat that had not needed patching, mending, replacing or discarding.

As opposed to the centreboard, a hefty slab of hardwood that seemed to break at every opportunity, and the last item in this over-technical catalogue. The centreboard is a slim but heavy vane of timber that slots down through the hull and projects like an upside-down shark’s fin several feet below the keel. When down it provides stability and prevents the dinghy drifting sideways in certain sailing conditions. When drawn up and out of the long centreboard case, it lies around, barks your shins and, if you are going fast enough, allows the foamy brine to well up through the case like a bubbling spring and fill half the dinghy with water before you notice what is happening.

So there you have a Mirror dinghy described. Any questions? (No, not you, Smithers, put your hand down, I don’t want to know. Dismissed.)

Or rather, that is only one aspect of the Mirror described. In one of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books the children meet a retired star, a silvery old man named Ramandu who has come to rest awhile from the great celestial dance on a remote island. One of the children, on hearing his tale, splutters out in disbelief, ‘But Sir, in our land a star is just a huge flaming ball of gas.’ Ramandu replies, ‘My son, even in your world, that is not what a star is, but only what a star is made of.’

By the same token, I have told you not what Jack de Crow is, merely what she was made of. To tell you what that gallant little boat is, I must borrow from the poets and the songs of voyagers everywhere. For Jack is all these: a stately Spanish galleon sailing from the isthmus, dipping through the tropics by the palm-green shores – Tom Bombadil’s cockle-boat, otter-nudged and swan-drawn up the Withywindle as the day draws down – a gilded barge bearing King Pellinore to Flanders in Malory’s romance – or the magic flying Viking ship of a forgotten childhood story. He is Madog of the Dead Boat in his dark coracle beneath the shadow of the Welsh Bridge – Captain Cook’s Endeavour sailing into Botany Bay in the bright, banksia-scented sunshine – or even that other little Mirror many years ago in which a small boy sailed between lonely isles on a lake in the Snowy Mountains, dreaming of Doctor Dolittle, treasure maps, pith helmets and the rivers of old England where I knew I would one day voyage.

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* Like the boat’s avian namesake, Jack proved an elusive and tricksy individual from the very start. There was, for example, the question of the vessel’s gender. The name Jack and the original bird were, of course, masculine, even aggressively so at times, but as every sailor knows, ships are always ‘she.’ So which was it to be? He or she? Him or her? Shunning the attractions of an ambiguous and androgynous companion for my trip down the waterways, I soon settled on ‘she,’ and Jack de Crow remains a lady, albeit a rather tomboyish one, to this day.

Departure and Dismay

Farewell, happy fields,

Where joy forever dwells; hail, horrors!

—MILTON, Paradise Lost

Clop, creak, splosh.

Clop, creak, splosh.

Clop, creak, RAM, tangle, splosh.

I was off .

It was a mild, golden evening, the second day of September. Some hours earlier I had trailered the good ship Jack de Crow over to the canal at Colemere Woods. Here a little redbrick bridge carries a farm track over the canal where it runs between Yell Wood and a wide field running up to a gentle horizon. In summer this field is a Monet’s palette of scarlet poppies and sky-blue linseed, and one large solitary oak tree tops the rise, a lonely giant against the sky. But this evening fifty or so of my friends and colleagues and a handful of students thronged the bridge, each with a glass in hand, and cheered as my dear friend Debbie officially christened the boat with a bottle of home-made hawthorn brandy. This clear amber liquid I had distilled some years previously from hawthorn blossom, collected one sunny May afternoon on the banks of Whitemere, and it had been from the very start utterly undrinkable. It was good to find an appropriate use for it at last.

Debbie had dressed superbly for the occasion in an Edwardian outfit and her short speech was touching and apt, but she was clearly unfamiliar with the usual protocol of ship-launching. Instead of the customary shattering of the bottle on the prow, for reasons she has yet adequately to explain, she uncorked the bottle and proceeded to pour the rancid fermenting liquor into the dinghy, liberally scattering it over thwart and deck and rucksack. Three thousand dancing midges dropped like confetti out of the air over a fifty-foot radius, the merry throng on the bridge above us reeled back clutching their throats, and I half expected to see the newly varnished deck start to bubble and peel like frying bacon as the hawthorn brandy got to work on the timbers.

Nevertheless, Jack de Crow slid down the bank and into the canal and bobbed, a buoyant little vessel impatient to be off. All my farewells had been said, all my worldly goods stowed, the mast and rigging lay in a long neat bundle down one side, the oars were in their rowlocks and the light was fading. It was time to go.

Clop, creak, splosh.

Clop, creak, splosh.

Clop, creak, splosh.

Clop, creak, splosh.

And the last the good folk of Ellesmere College saw of me was a small pith-helmeted figure rowing away into the shadowy blue dusk beneath the beech trees, a silver V of ripples at the bow diminishing to nothing until a bend of the woody canal hid me from sight and I was gone.

The drama of the occasion – the rowing off into the sunset, the gloomy woods and blue shadows, a setting for A Midsummer Night’s Dream – all of this had been exactly as I intended. But as the silence closed about me, I suddenly felt flat and rather tired. A romantic gesture it had been, and I had been playing the star role – but it was a real farewell too, with all that entails. From tonight I was, quite literally, homeless. Nor did I have a new job to go to. I had left behind six years of familiarity and friendship and ease, and I had only the vaguest notion of where I was going. As the dusk deepened to darkness, the water about me became a black mirror etched only with fine silver-point, fine as nettle-hairs. Somewhere an early owl hooted. Under my very bows something turned with a clop and sent rings of light rippling across the canal waters, silver on Indian ink.

For all the beauty, a sense of desolation seemed to rise like a mist from the waters beneath me and the dark pool of Blakemere on my left. Midges whined in my ears; my hands upon the oars were already slippery with sweat and the dinghy seemed to skid from tangled bank to bank as I made my unsteady progress down the dark tunnel of trees. It also occurred to me, somewhat more prosaically, that in all the glamour of planning for this departure I had forgotten to find out how to row. It is not as easy as it looks, not by a long chalk.

It was with some relief and feeling a little foolish that I emerged into a clearer stretch of the canal running between two fields. The sky was now fully dark, a lovely deep Prussian blue spangled with warm stars, and as I reached the junction where the short arm turns right towards Ellesmere Town, the main canal wound away to the left, inlaid with the reflecting constellations. All the magic of the crossroads rose up to meet me in the neat foursquare signpost that glimmered white at the junction. ‘The road goes ever on and on,’ I murmured to myself, thinking of Bilbo slipping away to Wilderland in the dusk. It dispelled the last clinging webs of Blakemere’s dark spell, the smell of weed and stagnant water. Happier now and with a sort of calm excitement, I turned my dinghy westward and rowed away into the night.

That evening I rowed only another mile or so and curled up on the towpath under a little humpbacked bridge carrying a disused farm lane between two fields. Snug in my sleeping bag and my head pillowed on a fleecy jacket, I lay awake awhile listening to the night noises around me: the breezy rustle of dry leaves in the sloe hedge, the distant bark of a dogfox, the cough of a nearby cow.

Just beyond that far hedge were the playing fields of the College, and just up the hill my friends were settling down for the night in their cosy apartments, high in some redbrick tower or grey-gabled wing. In ten short minutes I could walk there and knock on any of a dozen doors for a late-night whisky or mug of coffee. I could even beg a bed for the night instead of this damp and lonely towpath. Perhaps I will, I thought. One more night. One more evening of warmth and companionship. They’ll understand. I’ve had three farewell parties already, so a fourth won’t matter, surely. That cow is coming closer. I don’t want cow-cough all over me. Better start tomorrow. Debbie could christen the boat with something a little less noxious this time. Properly.

Cough, cough … Rustle … Snore.

I woke with a start. The sky was an early morning grey, a brambling was singing in the hedge above me, and the grass was pearled over with dew. In the next field a flock of blackheaded gulls was pecking over the newly ploughed soil, occasionally rising into the air in a swirling, white-flaked cloud before settling again further on. Now, looking back on that scene, can I recall a bulkier shape among them, perhaps? A different bill? No …? No … it’s no good. If there was an albatross among those gulls, I never noticed it. There was certainly nothing whatsoever to indicate that the next eighteen hours were to be the most disastrous of my life.

My plan, as far as I had one, was this. On consulting the Shrewsbury Ordnance Survey Map (OS 126) a few days earlier, I had been pleased to note that the Shropshire Union Canal that ran past Ellesmere wound its way westward for a few miles and then forked. The right-hand branch turned northward towards Llangollen via a spectacular aqueduct and several long tunnels, but the southern branch lolloped along in a less dramatic fashion towards Welshpool and the Breidden Hills. There at Welshpool, the canal ran parallel to the upper reaches of the River Severn, separated only by a strip of road. Once I had made it to there (two hours? three hours?), it would surely be the work of a minute to commandeer some loitering youths, the yeomanry of Welshpool, and haul Jack de Crow the twenty feet or so between the canal and the river. As I saw it, that would be the only major obstacle between me and the Bristol Channel. Once on the broad bosom of the rolling Severn, I’d probably be in Bristol by tea-time the next day.

I had been sitting in the White Lion Antique Shop and Tea Rooms the previous day, my OS map spread before me, cheerfully telling anyone who would listen of my proposed route, when a grubby figure slurping tea in the corner spoke up.

‘Ellesmere to Welshpool, ye say, young maister? Along that theer thicky canal? Ee, but ye’ll ’ave a deal o’ moither gittin’ a boat beyond Maesbury on that bit o’ water, that ye will. Arrr.’

A little miffed at this interruption to what had been turning into a splendid account of the coming voyage to a group of admiring customers (as long as I kept talking, they kept buying me cinnamon tea-cakes), I turned and replied in the sort of confident tones that Phineas Fogg himself might have used to address a doubting crony in the Athenaeum.

‘My good man, we’re not talking about a common barge or motor launch here. Though you may be right in pointing out the limitations of such craft, my Jack de Crow can go anywhere, Sir. La! She is a pioneering vessel, Sir, a feather-light, flat-bottomed skiff whose very delight is those winding waterways, those reedy backwaters closed to the world and its dog. I think you need not worry on that account, Sir!’

‘Ahrr well,’ said the rustic cynic in the corner. ‘Suit yerself. All Oi knows is that Oi graze my goats on that theer stretch o’ the canal. Still you’m knows best, Oi’m sure. Marnin’!’

And off he stomped.

A second, closer scrutiny of the OS map among the teacups did reveal that yes, beyond Maesbury Marsh the solid pale-blue line indicating the canal did seem to thin out a little … in fact, became distinctly dotted … and I might have to revise my route.

Damn.

Some of my audience were losing faith in my abilities as an explorer and beginning to drift away, so I had to make up my mind quickly. Ah yes, here. This thin blue thread on the map. The very thing. Perfect.

‘I will, gentlemen,’ I rapped out, snapping all attention back to me, ‘be taking the ship down …’

Yes? Yes?

(A nifty flourish of a handy teaspoon.)

‘… the Morda Brook.’

Gasp!

That’ll show ’em, I thought. The Morda Brook. So that was the plan. A breezy sail down the canal to Maesbury Marsh, where surely some ox-eyed yokel would be standing by to await orders; a quick lift and heave of the featherweight skiff into the limpid waters of the Morda Brook; and an easy ride on the current down to the Vyrnwy River and the cottage of a friend and colleague, Keith, who would expect me for a gin and tonic and early supper that evening.

A plan beautiful for its spontaneity, simplicity and utterly deluded optimism.

After two hours of rowing in good spirits between banks heavy with ripe blackberries, I came to Frankton Locks, a series of three locks stepping down a long decline of about six hundred yards. I was mildly apprehensive about how Jack and I would be greeted here. I had no idea whether small unpowered vessels were allowed through them. There was also an uneasy thought in my mind concerning licences. Did I need one? Surely not for such a harmless little tub.

So it was with a few well-rehearsed winning smiles and persuasive banter that I approached the first of the three locks.

‘Ah,’ said I to the red-haired lock-keeper who appeared. He had watery blue eyes and a complexion the colour of brick-dust. ‘There’s no problem, I assume, in taking this little fellow down the locks, is there?’

‘Yep.’

‘Ah. Meaning Yep, I can?’

‘No. Meaning Yep, there’s a problem. No unpowered boats in the locks, I’m afraid. Sorry.’

‘I’ve got oars,’ I said brightly, waggling them at him.

‘Sorry,’ he said, and turned on his heel.

I had a brief but miserable vision of rowing back to the College, poking my head round the Common Room door and saying, ‘Hi! Remember me! The Traveller returns. Brilliant trip. I’ll tell you all about it one day. Meanwhile, anyone got an Inter-City timetable I could borrow?’

This I quickly dispelled and hurried after the lock-keeper.

‘Um, hello, sorry. Me again.’

A blank look.

‘Chap with the dinghy, yes? Look, there’s a barge coming along now. What if I get towed through? Is that okay?’

Red looked me up and down, looked at Jack de Crow wallowing hopefully beside me, and made up his mind.

‘Nope. Sorry. No towing.’

Right, right. Right.

I took a deep breath, and hurried after him once more.

‘Okay. Here’s what I’ll have to do. I’ll empty her of all her luggage, remove the bundled rigging and somehow lift her out of the canal. Then I will drag her bodily down the towpath to beyond the lowest lock. I assume there’s no serious objection to that?’

There followed a few seconds of teeth-sucking cogitation and, finally, grudging agreement.

‘But if you start cutting up the towpath,’ he added, ‘I’ll have to ask you to stop. We can’t have British Waterways property damaged, you know.’

By now I was beginning to suspect that Mr Ginger-mop was not fully behind my project. The suspicion was confirmed when, after I had removed the luggage, the rigging, the oars and all extraneous weight, it came time to lift bodily the entire dinghy up the sheer three feet of concrete canal bank onto the towpath; a two-man-and-a-small-crane job if ever there was one.

‘Right,’ I called to Mr Stickler-for-the-Rules, who’d been sitting on a nearby bollard lighting up a pipe. ‘I’m ready.’

‘Ready? For what?’

‘I wonder if you could possibly help me to lift … it’s a bit tricky for one person, you see, and …’

‘Oh no. Can’t do that, I’m afraid. Not my job, see. Can’t get involved.’

And he took another contented puff on his pipe.

Flinging sotto voce a few happy statistics about tongue cancer and pipe smokers over my shoulder, I set to hauling the boat out of the water. The method I adopted was to haul up Jack’s bows as far as I could until the dinghy’s keel was resting on the concrete lip of the canal, her rear two-thirds sloping sharply down into the water. Then, putting all my weight on the front third and ignoring the ominous cracking sounds of grinding timber from her keel, I levered the stern up level until the boat was horizontally hanging out seven feet over the water. Finally, I pivoted the whole boat around parallel to the canal and safely onto the towpath.

This method brought on only the mildest of hernias and was one I had occasion to use later, so I was actually very grateful to Mr Carrot for his passive encouragement to develop a solo technique. That gratitude does not extend, however, to his next piece of churlishness.

I started to haul Jack down the towpath, a long and mercifully grassy slope of about six hundred metres, but by a third of the way down I was reduced to a sobbing wreck. I recalled my conversation in the tea shop. Feather-light skiff ? Hah! Light-winged dryad of the waterways? Pshaw! Bobbish little jollyboat? Phooey! She felt as if she were constructed of solid plutonium, and was about as draggable on dry land as a dead dugong. The fact that it had begun to drizzle did not improve my spirits.

Just then, when I was picturing in my mind’s eye the warmth, comfort and grace of a British Rail Inter-City second-class carriage, there came a friendly call: ‘Need a hand, mate?’

Two burly workmen scraping some windowpanes on a refurbished lock-side cottage had watched my painful progress down the towpath and decided I needed help. I directed one to take the prow and the other to join me in carrying the stern, and with a quick heave-ho we had covered the next fifty yards in a matter of seconds. In two minutes more I would be afloat and on my merry way again, a free spirit, a lissom Ariel, a bird of … ‘OY!’

The call floated down the towpath from the top lock where the lock-keeper was standing beckoning to the two workmen to drop what they were doing and come immediately.

They did.

They returned.

‘Sorry mate,’ they intoned together. ‘The boss says we’re not to get involved, and we have to get back to work on ’is window frames. Sorry. Good luck, though,’ and off they trudged to the cottage.

Ah. I see. So when the lock-keeper said he couldn’t get involved, he clearly didn’t include in his policy of

Reviews for The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

[adzebill · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An utterly delightful read. The delight comes from the snatches of poetry sprinkled at appropriate times into the landscape descriptions, from the little pencil drawings and maps scattered throughout, and from the author's whimsical descriptions of his own foibles and eccentricities (starting from the top, with his sola topi). Inspires one to hit the road, or rather the canals, and spend a year sailing and rowing the length of Europe, getting plenty of sun and exercise and subsisting entirely on salami and tomato sandwiches and the kindness of strangers.

[nandadevi_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It might be churlish to suggest that the most defining virtue of this excellent book is that it makes the efforts of others - not least Patrick Leigh Fermor - look self indulgent, turgid and dull by comparison. It is not dull, un-dull, indeed sparkling. Like good travel writing should be. And like the best travel writing it is about a journey, not about a book the author went on a journey in order to produce. That was probably churlish as well, but it disposes nicely of Theroux and Newby and just about everything they have ever written. I don't think there's any need to say any more than others here have already said quite well, except that I recommend it highly to the reader.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've been vaguely following a thread through "up the Rhine and down the Danube" travel books lately: this is the most recent I've come across so far (1997/98), and definitely the most eccentric. Mackinnon doesn't set out with a big plan: he lets circumstances guide him and grabs opportunities when they arise. Having set out to do a little trip down the Severn, it seems self-evident once you get to Gloucester to extend it to Bristol, and then to the Thames, and once you're in London, you might as well do the Continent as well...As it turns out, the thing that seems the oddest feature of his journey — the choice of a tiny, ancient, unpowered "Mirror" sailing dinghy as his means of transport — becomes one of the most liberating elements. Mackinnon is forced to travel light, he is perceived by local people as a charming and helpless eccentric, not as a wealthy yachtsman, and in practice he can go almost anywhere. When he gets into difficulties, there always seems to be someone around that he can charm into fishing him out and patching the boat up. About half the book is taken up by the British part of his journey: down the Severn, up the Avon, through the Kennett & Avon to the Thames, up to Lechlade and back down to London, then round the Kent coast to Dover. Mackinnon's route on the Continent is a little different from the "standard approach": instead of fighting against the Rhine current (which would have been impossible for him) he heads through the French canals from Calais to the Moselle, then down to Koblenz, so that he only needs a tow from Koblenz to Frankfurt (typically, he finds a barge skipper willing to take him without the slightest difficulty). He is able to use the new RMD canal (oddly referred to as "the Kaiser's canal") to get to the Danube, and once on the Danube apparently has a far more straightforward trip than most of the other writers I've looked at: presumably in part due to travelling with a shallow-draught boat in summer, and in part due to improvements in the navigation. Of course, there are other problems, mostly in Serbia, which was at that time under a UN embargo and about to be bombed by NATO. Not being aware of this, Mackinnon is a bit puzzled that he can't get any bank to take his Visa card...The real charm of the book is in Mackinnon's cheerful approach to travel, which seems to have been inspired chiefly by the classics of English children's literature. At moments of crisis he always has a comforting quotation from The wind in the willows or a handy tip from a Swallows and Amazons story to hand; when things are going well plays his penny whistle or sings numbers from G&S operettas as he rows (a definite improvement over Tristan Jones's cassette player with bagpipe music!). I lost count of how many times he fell in, got covered in mud, or lost some vital piece of equipment overboard: he always seems to come up smiling.

[lesleynicol · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A delightful story of one man's voyage to follow his dream and all the mishaps and adventures along the way.I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[klerulo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is simply a delightful tale of humanity being about as good as it can be. Very entertainingly written. I only hope the author will find another genre so he doesn't have to go on lengthy, arduous and potentially perilous journeys just so we can be entertained as much as this every few years!

[figgles_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Amazing, I thought books like this were no longer written, an odyssey in a Mirror Dinghy from Shropshire to the Black Sea, the best description would be a child of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Jermome K Jerome with CS Lewis, Arthur Ransome, Tolkien, Keats, Betjamen and Gilbert and Sullivan as the good fairies at its christening. Humour, adventure, song, and it only happened 12 years ago. Brilliant.

[sgtsmall-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reading this book raised 3 things for me. Firstly, the wonder of the english language. The style and skill of the language used invoked the feeling of floating along in this wonderful little dinghy. Secondly, the serendipity of unconstrained travel. Usually buying into an "adventure holiday" leaves you with a "by the numbers" feeling. This story showed that adventure can find you. Lastly, I wanted to be young enough to go back to school and be inspired by someone like this! Highly recommended for "children" of all ages who may need to be reminded that life should involve some journeys.

[tassin_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In 1997 the author launched a 12 foot dinghy - the Jack de Crow of the title - in the Llangollen canal in North Shropshire in England. He planned to sail or row for two weeks as far as he could go - probably to Gloucester on the River Severn. When he got there he decided to keep going, as you do. This section of his journey ended in London from where he resumed his voyage the following spring. Three thousand miles and 11 countries later, he ended his voyage at the Black Sea, having been blessed with much good fortune and the kindness of strangers.Mackinnon has a degree in English literature and is a teacher of English and drama by profession. The book is liberally sprinkled with literary references (at one point in the voyage, he sets himself the task of memorising a book of John Keats' poetry) and the author's own sketches (he eschews cameras).I first heard of this book after listening to a reading by the author on Australia's Radio National. It made me chuckle and persuaded me to read the book. I'm glad I did as it is an engaging account of a quirky voyage by a slightly eccentric author and, like him, I would like to keep going and read something more from him (perhaps about his earlier travels that he touches on in this book).